Why are politicians comparing everything to the Second World War?

by ROBERT FISK

“[Union of] Soviet [Socialist Republic] soldiers killed during the Toropets–Kholm Offensive, January 1942. Officially, roughly 8.7 million Soviet soldiers died in the course of the war, including millions of POWs.” PHOTO/TEXT/Wikipedia

By contrast, the Russians have avoided all mention of their own World Wars – an infinitely greater sacrifice in the second than all the other allies put together – and have shrewdly marketed their response and RT’s propaganda around our own failure to ask obvious questions

What in the name of God prompts our pseudo-Churchills to play fast and loose with the Second World War? First of all, it was Theresa May saying that “not since” the Second World War had nerve agents been used in Europe. Then Boris Johnson did his poseur act against Russia under the wing of a replica Battle of Britain Spitfire – when he wasn’t poncing around next door in the wartime RAF underground operations room at Uxbridge.

Is this childish stuff really convincing the people of Britain? Or does it merely betray ignorance? Or is it merely making political use – all over again – of the epic tragedy of the 20th century?

Now Johnson is at it again, comparing the Russian World Cup this summer with Hitler’s 1936 Berlin Olympics. But the Berlin games excluded German Jewish and Roma competitors and was intended to smother – however briefly – the Nazis’ anti-Semitic and racist policies as a propaganda coup for Hitler’s dictatorship. The Russian World Cup will be exploited by the Kremlin, but has no anti-Jewish or any other racist restrictions on competitors.

When Johnson expressed concern for the safety of British fans, was he suggesting they might be victims of Hitler-style anti-Jewish violence? What nonsense. The 1936 Olympics were held almost exactly three years before the Nazi invasion of Poland. Is Johnson now suggesting that Russia is going to start World War Three in 2021?

The Russians have a lot of questions to answer about the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, his daughter Yulia and police sergeant Nick Bailey. But what on earth has that got to do with the Second World War? The truth cannot have had much to do with it.

The parallels are not, of course, exact, although the media have played along with the Second World War scenario. Reuters, for example, picked up the British line on the poison used in Salisbury, describing it as “the first known offensive use of such a nerve agent on European soil since World War Two”. But, as I ask above, is that actually true? Chemicals, yes. But nerve agents? If you think this is a bit finickity, just look at how the Hitler/Second World War analogies have played out.

We used to claim that Saddam was “the Hitler of the Tigris”, but this week Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, a hitherto unknown student of the 1939-45 war, is telling Americans that the territorial ambitions of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, can be compared to Hitler’s, warning that he did “not want to see the same events occurring in the Middle East”. So which of these two Muslim nations, one might ask, is currently blitzkrieging a neighbouring country?

But specious historical parallels have no end. By chance, I was passing through Turkey at the weekend where I learned that President Erdogan – on the 103rd anniversary of the Battle for Gallipoli, no less – was comparing this epic First World War engagement with Turkey’s current “fight against terror” in Afrin. The ANZAC troops in Suvla Bay might have been obscurely flattered had they known that they would one day be compared to the Kurdish YPG (or PKK, for that matter) but surely Erdogan couldn’t be serious when he compared his Turkish army invaders of northern Syria – not to mention their Syrian/Islamist allies who were busy looting shops and homes in Afrin – with the courage of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk at Gallipoli.

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